# Finding Representative Interpretations on Convolutional Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.06384 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06384/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Learning Important Features Through Propagating Activation Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02685/) (2017)
- [Interpretability Beyond Feature Attribution: Quantitative Testing with Concept Activation Vectors (TCAV)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11279/) (2017)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [Striving for Simplicity: The All Convolutional Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6806/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [This Looks Like That: Deep Learning for Interpretable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10574/) (2018)
- [Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01279/) (2019)
- [Interpretation of Neural Networks is Fragile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10547/) (2017)
- [On the Number of Linear Regions of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1402.1869/) (2014)
- [On the Robustness of Interpretability Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08049/) (2018)
- [Counterfactual Visual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07451/) (2019)
- [On the Expressive Power of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05336/) (2016)
- [Explaining NonLinear Classification Decisions with Deep Taylor Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02479/) (2015)
- [Distilling a Neural Network Into a Soft Decision Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09784/) (2017)
- [Explanations can be manipulated and geometry is to blame](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07983/) (2019)
- [Full-Gradient Representation for Neural Network Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00780/) (2019)
- [Maxout Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1302.4389/) (2013)
- [Net2Vec: Quantifying and Explaining how Concepts are Encoded by Filters in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03454/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Proto2Proto: Can you recognize the car, the way I do?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11830/) (2022)
- [TrajPAC: Towards Robustness Verification of Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05985/) (2023)
- [Understanding Distributed Representations of Concepts in Deep Neural Networks without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17285/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Interpreting the decision logic behind effective deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) on images complements the success of deep learning models. However, the existing methods can only interpret some specific decision logic on individual or a small number of images. To facilitate human understandability and generalization ability, it is important to develop representative interpretations that interpret common decision logics of a CNN on a large group of similar images, which reveal the common semantics data contributes to many closely related predictions. In this paper, we develop a novel unsupervised approach to produce a highly representative interpretation for a large number of similar images. We formulate the problem of finding representative interpretations as a co-clustering problem, and convert it into a submodular cost submodular cover problem based on a sample of the linear decision boundaries of a CNN. We also present a visualization and similarity ranking method. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the excellent performance of our method.
